Brush Up VR review

I was contacted by Games That Work to review their upcoming game Brush Up VR. The game will be released on February the 1st, just in time for National Children Dental Health Month, on SteamVR. Its price will be $0.99.

Why should we care about “National Children Dental Health Month”? Because the game is about washing our teeth. It is made to make us think about how good and how much we wash our teeth each day. It has been designed with children in mind, but thinking about adults, too. As the author of the game says:

“Kids only brush what they see in the mirror, and many adults aren’t much better” says Dr. Bob Jacobson, the family dentist behind Brush Up. “They spend two minutes polishing the front teeth and scrubbing the easy side. That won’t work in Brush Up VR. You must clean the inner, outer and biting surface of every tooth.”

NVIDIA VR Funhouse review

Some days ago I finally tried a game that every Vive owner has tried decades ago: Nvidia® VR Funshouse (The ® is super-fundamental, like the ™ in Monkey Island saga…). This is one of the most used games in VR showcases (along The Lab, Job Simulator and few other ones).

VR Funhouse has been made by NVIDIA® for the following reasons:

• To show us that they’re cool (but we already knew that after trying their GEFORCE GTX1080);
• To show their commitment towards VR;
• To show cool stuff that you can do with a NVIDIA® graphics cards (during the game there are lots of fancy things that stress the card… the Maximum graphical level of the game requires 2 GTX1080!!! W000t, so luxurious! (Honestly, I’ve only one but the game worked flawlessly));
• To show their PhysX physics engine capabilities: in VR, realistic physics becomes even more important and they wanted to show us that they’re ready for this challenge.

Virtual reality games: The Affected (+how to make it work with Oculus CV1)

The Affected is one of my favourite virtual reality games of all times. At the moment it’s just a small demo that was made for Oculus DK2 (so lots of time ago), but it’s really awesome. The developers say that they’re developing a version for Oculus CV1 and other episodes, but I’ve never found them anywhere. But I hope that’s true, because I’m really eager to try a new version of this game!

The Affected is a horror virtual reality game, divided in 3 small episodes: The Manor, The Hospital and the Carnival. Every episode is scary as hell, so this is not a game for the faint of heart!

How can you begin developing for virtual reality?

Continuing my serie on the most asked questions on reddit (I already answered about if you have to buy a VR headset and which one you should buy), today I’ll talk about what do you need to know to start developing some games in virtual reality.

So, how can you begin developing for virtual reality? What do you need to know?

I’ll just tell you a little secret: developing for virtual reality requires almost exactly the same skills of any other 3D games development. But keep this secret for yourself: it is so cool when you impress people saying them that you’re a virtual reality developer and girls just go crazy for it because they think that you’re some kind of futurist superhero, like Johnny Mnemonic.

Twitch: first impressions

Some days ago Max and me had the crazy idea to publish our full-body virtual reality game experiments on Twitch. The idea turned out to be great, since now we’re on first, second and third position if you search for “Oculus” on twitch! (wow, a whole podium!) If you lost our last broadcast, well, you can still found it here or in the highlights here.

I know since a lot about Twitch, but I never streamed to it and never had even a look to it. So, today I wanted to try this famous website, to have my own opinion and be able to write it to you.

Thanks for joining us on Twitch!

Today we made our first serious streaming on Twitch of the demo game that we of ImmotionAR are developing with my friends Max and Viktor of NTW. The game has to exploit the full body tracking capabilities of the ImmotionRoom system and has one simple rule: “catch the f.ing cubes!”.

We had lots of fun playing it: we also made other people try it for their first time and they were really amazed! Wow, we’re happy that this game, even so simple, has had a so great feedback! At the end we also made a little interview where we explained what is our vision for full body of the user in virtual reality.

I want to personally thank you all people that helped us in making this broadcast (Max I love you) and all people that have followed us! If you lost it, don’t worry: you can still re-watch the broadcast on 3klan channel!

Let’s hang out on Twitch!

Tomorrow, 18th of August, at 3.00PM UTC time (5.00PM here in Italy) we’ll stream on Twitch on 3klan channel!

Join us, so you can see me and my fellow game developer Max Ariani of NTW making experiments with virtual reality games that exploit the full body tracking of the ImmotionRoom system. We’ve made a little prototype and we want to show it to you! This can be a great occasion to talk a bit about virtual reality, full body tracking, video game developments and have fun together! See you tomorrow!